Science Highlights

Ali Erdemir has dedicated nearly his entire career to reducing the friction between moving parts, an effort that recently culminated in his receipt of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Mayo D. Hersey Award “in recognition of distinguished and continued contribution over a substantial period of time to the advancement of lubrication science and engineering.”

An international collaboration involving two U.S. Department of Energy national laboratories has demonstrated a way to reach dramatically smaller focal sizes for hard X-rays, opening the door to research with hard X-rays at atomic-scale.

Associate Laboratory Director Mark Peters was honored this week as a Fellow of the American Nuclear Society. Fellow is the highest member status presented by the society, and is granted for outstanding accomplishments in the areas of nuclear science and technology.

Experts in water conservation, efficiency and behavioral sciences will be gathering later this month at Argonne to address how behavior-changing technologies can play a role in addressing projected shortfalls in water supply.

By using standard semiconductor manufacturing equipment, a team of scientists demonstrated a nano-mechanical plasmon phase modulator that can control and manipulate the flow of plasmons at the nanoscale without any degradation in optical performance.

By combining a variety of different experimental techniques and theory, a group led by researchers at Argonne obtained unique insights into the nature of the pseudogap state in a canonical charge density wave material.

Argonne’s Advanced Protein Characterization Facility has received the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Gold certification. Construction of the APCF was funded by the State of Illinois.

Chicago’s John G. Shedd Aquarium announced the launch of the Aquarium Microbiome Project – the first-ever study exploring the microscopic living community in a controlled aquarium environment and its impact on the animals that live in them.

In a paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research – Atmospheres, researchers identified the value added by a regional climate model - which addresses a long-standing question in the scientific community on the utility of downscaling.